Republicans wonder if Pence has what it takes to challenge Trump

Former Vice President Mike Pence grabbed the nation’s attention this past Friday with three simple words: “Trump is wrong.”

But many Republicans who want the party to move on from the last president still wonder whether Trump’s former second-in-command has what it takes to go toe to toe for control of the Republican Party.

Pence and his allies are growing bolder in making a case for his leadership, and there is evidence that Pence is gaining resolve to run in 2024, whether or not Trump does.

Yet in one day this week, a member of the Republican National Committee, a scholar based at a think tank and an anti-Trump GOP political operative all told Yahoo News that they believe Pence is too cautious and conflict-averse to challenge Trump in 2024.

They don’t question his courage or resolve after Jan. 6. That question, they say, has been answered. They do, however, doubt his appetite for the kind of scorched-earth fight that will come at some point if he wishes to lead the party instead of Trump.

Another Republican political operative, who has won elections for sitting U.S. senators but is privately anti-Trump, also said he doesn’t think Pence can command the kind of fervor that Trump does. “I feel like [Pence] has the smell of death around him,” the operative said.

That’s how Trump sees it too, according to one adviser. “He thinks Pence is dead, politically,” the adviser told Yahoo News.

Early public polling for the 2024 Republican presidential primary has shown Pence lagging well behind his former boss. A Yahoo News/YouGov survey from late January showed Pence with 6 percent of the GOP primary vote, trailing both Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. An Ipsos survey at that time, however, did find Pence with a higher approval rating of 74 percent to Trump's 64 percent.

But Pence allies who spoke with Yahoo News see something else going on. Pence’s speech last Friday at the Federalist Society, they said, was a sign that Pence’s calculated and methodological style has set him on a collision course with Trump, just maybe not as quickly or definitively as some might like.

“I am confident that it’s not the high-water mark for him. I’m confident that he is stretching his wings, purposely and carefully expanding his message and getting his feet under him for 2024,” said Michael Murphy, a former Indiana state legislator and political consultant who has known Pence for over 20 years and still connects with him occasionally when Pence is in his home state of Indiana.

Meanwhile, Pence backers from Indiana are growing confident enough to voice full-throated endorsements of the actions he took to stand in the way of Trump’s attempt to seize power on Jan. 6.

Republican National Committee member John Hammond, an Indiana Republican, referenced the GOP’s bungled handling last week of a motion to censure Republicans on the Jan. 6 committee.

“Maybe the next RNC resolution ought to be to suggest [Pence] be given the Medal of Freedom for what he did on January 6th,” Hammond told Yahoo News. “At the most fragile moment in our country’s history — maybe since Watergate — he saved the republic.”

Murphy said there are clues that Pence’s most rock-steady personality trait — his deeply conservative and sincere Christian faith — has been married to a determination to run for president, come what may. One line from his speech last week, in particular, stands out in this respect.

“Whatever the future holds, I know we did our duty that day,” Pence said of his refusal to cave to Trump’s pressure to overturn the election. He then repeated a quote attributed to the nation’s sixth president, John Quincy Adams, which Pence also used in his letter on Jan. 6 explaining why he could not and would not overturn the election results: “Duty is ours, results are God’s.”

There is a stoic fatalism in these words. But, alternatively, there’s also room in that sentiment for Pence to decide it is not his duty to run in 2024.

Yet Pence’s closest advisers are making arguments for their man that will be the starting point for any presidential candidacy.

Marc Short, one of Pence’s closest advisers, told Yahoo News that he disagrees with the conventional wisdom that a 2024 candidacy “necessitates prosecuting Trump” in the sense that everything should be about condemning him.

“It’s my sense from traveling around the country that people want to talk about the future. Outside D.C., people want to move on,” Short said.

When asked about Pence’s resolve, Short ticked off a list of the times that Pence, as a member of Congress, stood up against former President George W. Bush. Short listed Pence’s opposition to Bush’s No Child Left Behind education bill, as well as his votes against two other Bush-era priorities: the 2008 Wall Street bailout and Medicare Part D.

Short’s example does two things. It shows that he has confronted a leader of his own party other than Trump in the past when he thought it was right. It positions Pence as acting out of principle rather than out of animus against Trump. It’s an added bonus that many Trump supporters have soured on Bush anyway.

In addition, Short’s wielding of deep biographical research on Pence is not casual or offhand. It suggests an organized and exhaustive effort to build a compelling argument for why conservatives can move into the future with Pence.

The strategy for now is clearly to lead with a forward-looking, positive message and to answer Trump forcefully when he attacks, as Pence did last week. The contrast, they seem to hope, is that Trump will lose steam as he continues to look backwards in his obsession with the 2020 election.

This strategy assumes Trump will keep attacking and seeks to use that energy against him, somewhat like a sailboat tacking against the wind rather than forging straight ahead into the gale and getting nowhere.

Behind the scenes, Pence’s tight-knit political team (consisting of largely the same core of operators for more than a dozen years now) have been careful to pick their fights with Trump and avoid direct confrontations that might enrage the former president. But when opportunities present themselves, they take them, said one former Pence aide.

A former Pence aide said that his forceful rebuke of Trump last week came only “because Trump called him out.”

But even those who want to see Pence succeed are not convinced this will be enough.

“He’s stopped avoiding Trump’s provocations and that’s a good thing. He still, however, shrinks from really taking him head on over the issue of election fraud,” said Henry Olsen, a conservative analyst from the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

Olsen wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post days before Pence’s speech in which he argued that Pence will have to make a choice: “Shrink into private life entirely or someday meet his fate as the man with the conviction and stature needed to engage with Trump in this battle.”

Olsen told Yahoo News that Pence, in his Federalist Society speech, confronted Trump’s assertion that he could have overturned the election, but did not push back in the same way on Trump’s continued lies that the 2020 election was stolen.

In fact, Short said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” this past Sunday that “the vice president has significant concerns about the election.”

“There were significant concerns about the process of that election that’s going to create a cloud,” Short said. “At the same time ... the campaign had opportunities to bring that evidence up till December 14th and didn’t. ... The reality is that there was not enough significant fraud that was presented that would’ve overturned any of those states’ elections.”

This rhetoric strikes many as trying to pacify believers in the biggest lie about the 2020 election while only confronting the smaller mistruth about the role of the vice president. However, there is a political logic to it. In a recent CBS News/YouGov survey, 70 percent of Republicans said Congress should accept the election results rather than seek to overturn them.

Olsen said that “Pence has bought himself some breathing room and perhaps some time. But unless he decides not to run, he's going to have to face the music sometime.”

Other conservatives think Pence’s strategy is wise.

“I don’t think it helps him very much to re-litigate January 6th. His best play is to stand by what he did, but advocate for election integrity, attack Big Tech on election interference,” said Jon Schweppe, policy director for the conservative group American Principles Project.

If Pence harps too much on criticism of Trump, “all the base hears is someone out of touch with them,” Schweppe said.

Pence will continue his tour of crucial early voting states and wooing donors through this spring and will likely increase his appearances around the country this summer as the 2022 campaigns heat up, the former aide said.

Further collisions with Trump will be unavoidable, and may come sooner than later. On March 4, Pence is slated to share top billing with Trump at a fundraising retreat for the RNC in New Orleans, the first time the two will have appeared at the same event since Jan. 6.

Murphy, the friend and supporter, said that while Pence’s cautious nature makes him slow to commit to anything, once he does he is hard to move off his path.

“He doesn’t brush his teeth in the morning without thinking about how this is going to impact things. He is very, very calculating and I think that has served him well,” Murphy said.

“He has far more resolve than anybody else who may be considering the 2024 nomination, because he’s less driven by ego and opportunism than somebody like Chris Christie or DeSantis, who would knock you down to get to a TV camera.”